Bluebolt One (7 page)

“But—”

“You heard. Out. There’s an alley just there—get up it, get lost. It’s me they’re after, a thousand nicker to a penny. I know ’em. Don’t want you to get hurt.”

Shaw looked down as he felt the hard rim of a gun-muzzle dig into his side. He shrugged, pushed the door open, and got out. The moment his feet touched ground Jiddle leaned over and yanked the door shut and then accelerated. Dodging back into the alley which ran between two small, exclusive shops, Shaw watched from cover. Jiddle was nearly at the end of the street when the other car came round the corner on two wheels, tyres screaming, straightened, and hurtled down towards him. No one had seen Shaw, and he edged out when he heard the rattle of gunfire, saw Jiddle’s car slew round almost in its own length, run up on to the pavement, hit a lamp standard, then over once . . . twice . . . three times, and then burst into a roar of flames. As the other car swept past, it slowed, and a stream of bullets tore into the Humber.

Then the car accelerated again and was gone.

A police whistle shrilled, and almost at once the crowd gathered, Shaw, his face white, slid back into the shadows, went up the side alley. He couldn’t help poor Jiddle now; those men would have done an efficient job and he would be as dead as mutton, and there was far too much in the balance for Shaw to get mixed up in yet another murder. He would have to leave this to the police and keep his name right away from Jiddle’s—it was the only thing he could possibly do. This was another of the occasions on which Esmonde Shaw found himself detesting his job with every fibre of his being.

Sick at heart, Shaw walked quickly into Sloane Street and picked up a taxi, wondering if Jiddle had been right about who those men were really after.

Next morning Shaw went carefully through the papers, and in the Late News he found what he was looking for.

A car had been fired at off Sloane Street and a body had been found, charred, in the wreckage. The body had not so far been identified as being definitely that of the owner of the car—in other words, Jiddle—and whoever had fired the shots had got clear away in a fast car, a stolen car which had later been found abandoned a little way beyond Eccleston Bridge. No arrest had been made.

And none would be, Shaw thought savagely. Those men would simply vanish.

After that, Shaw made a telephone-call to Albany Street, and when he got through he didn’t waste any time. He said, “Deb, it’s me. I want to see you urgently. Can you talk Eastern Petroleum into giving you the day off, d’you think?”

“Darling,” she said, “I was just on the point of leaving for the office. Is it really important?”

“Yes, very.”

There was the briefest of pauses and then, because Debonnair Delacroix knew Esmonde never said things lightly, she told him she would fix it. She said, “Leave it to me. I’ll ring Pauline right away.” Pauline was her secretary, a girl who was still a little overawed at working for a girl who’d once been in the Foreign Office. “Coming round?”

“Right away, if that’s all right.”

She said fondly, “Never too soon for me, darling, and you know it.” He rang off, let himself out of the flat into Gliddon Road, walked down to the Hammersmith Road, and found a taxi. He was soon ringing Debonnair’s bell at the Albany Street flatlet. He heard high heels clicking along the short passage that formed the hall, and then she’d let him in and he was taking her in his arms. As she kissed him, her hazel eyes were wary, anxiously searching his face. As they went together into the sitting-room she asked, “I suppose it’s still to do with the night before last?”

He nodded. ‘There’s something I want you to do for me, if you will.”

“I’ll help all I can. You know that.”

“Yes, of course I do, darling.” He squeezed her arm, looked fondly down at the girl’s almost tawny skin, the skin which made the blood pump faster in his body. . . he looked away. He was here on business, and time was short. He knew he could rely on Debbie absolutely, could even sometimes take her pretty fully into his confidence. Her Foreign Office work—which had been responsible for throwing them together in the first place—was guarantee enough not only in Shaw’s eyes but in Latymer’s too. But all he said now was:

“I want to get in touch with a girl.”

Her eyes sparkled, suddenly mischievous. “
Really
, Esmonde!”

He went on, “She’s a girl who works in a shop. It’s a small place—a dress-shop in the King’s Road, Chelsea. Helene’s. D’you know it?”

“I don’t.” Sitting on the arm of a chair, she smoothed her frock over long, slim thighs, blonde head bent to hide a hint of quite irrational jealousy. She knew it was irrational and it didn’t last long. She looked up, her lips curved in laughter now. “But it sounds as though you’ve reconnoitred the ground pretty well yourself, doesn’t it, Esmonde dear?”

He grinned tightly. “Ass! Look, Deb, this is serious. I’ve got to find something out from this girl. And I don’t even know her name. All I know is that she’s a tall brunette—a ‘real classy bit and a good-looker’—to quote a description I was given last night.”

“Poor darling, you
are
going to have a search, aren’t you?”

“No,” he said, “you are.”

“Heavens, why me?” She looked bewildered.

He said, “Because if I went along it’d raise one hell of a lot of speculation—"

"You flatter yourself, my pet—"

"—and I'm playing this as carefully as I know how. We're handling something pretty prickly and we're liable to step on other people's toes—"

“Policemen’s toes?”

“Yes. Scotland Yard. Latymer doesn’t want it known we’re working on this—not yet, anyway; till we know rather more than we do at present. Now listen, Deb.” He put his hands on her shoulders and looked into her eyes. “I want you to go along to Helene’s and buy yourself a dress—or something—and get talking to the girl who serves you. Try to find out if any of the girls has been upset over a boy friend the last couple of days.” He hesitated. “I think I’ll have to tell you a bit of the story after all. I’m looking for the white girl friend of that coloured Tube guard of the night before last, the one who disappeared—”

“Isn’t this rather delicate ground, Esmonde? I mean ... the colour question and all that?”

“Yes, it is, and that’s another reason why I’d like you to handle it. She might resent a man. Just feel your way around it—you understand all right. All I want is a name and address for now. I’ll leave it to you to find the best way of breaking the ice on the spot in the circumstances as you find them. Can you do that?”

She said quietly, “I’ll have a shot. It shouldn’t be all that difficult—those little places don’t often have more than two or three girl assistants at the most, and they all love a bit of a gossip. Who doesn’t, anyway? But I don’t promise a thing, mind.” She looked at him with a peculiar, rather wistful expression. “Sounds as though she’s made rather a fool of herself, doesn’t it? I mean, a coloured boy friend who’s got himself into nasty trouble—and who may have let her in for another kind of trouble for all we know—h’m?”

“We don’t know anything about that. All I’m concerned with is finding out where MacNamara is, anyway. Whatever she may have done, it’s her own worry, Deb.”

“Yep, sure!” She swung her slim body off the arm of the chair and went over to a mirror. “It always is the girl’s worry, isn’t it? Makes you think, though.” She turned towards him. “All right, Esmonde dear, leave it to me. Kiss me.”

He took her face in his big hands, kissed her on the mouth, gently. He said, “Thanks, Debbie. Get along as soon as you can. In the meantime, I’ve got some homework to do. I’ll be back in the flat at lunch-time, maybe before. Go straight round there and give yourself a drink if I’m not in.” He grinned down at her, took her chin in his hands, loving the light dusting of golden freckles on the tawny cheekbones. “That’s if you haven’t lost the latch-key....”

She grinned back. “Darling, it’s my dearest possession, I wear it next to my heart. . . look, who was it who said just now to get along to Chelsea as soon as I can?”

They left Albany Street together and split up at Great Portland Street station.

Shaw made his way to the reference library in Kensington High Street. Here he was handy for Gliddon Road and could nip home quickly to stand by for Debbie. He spent the morning studying large volumes dealing with the peoples of Africa—and Nogolia in particular. And as he read, absorbedly, the quiet room seemed to grow quieter, dark with the secrets of the hidden, forbidding continent; the atmosphere thickened with the blood that had been spilt in ten thousand years of voodoo, a doctrine and a way of life as old as time itself, stretching back into pre-history. Africa, land of the Dark and Angry Gods, the men of hate and fury, the spine-chilling spirits whose gross appetites could be appeased only by human sacrifice and terror... those old gods still stalked the land and filled men’s minds to-day, made the lush green jungle creep with fear, and, except on the surface, twentieth-century progress came to a dead stop. Behind the factories of so-called Modem Africa, behind the copper- and diamond-and tin-mines, the gold-mines and the progressive industrial front, there still lurked the ancient paganism walking hand-in-hand with the ju-ju man who had a vested interest in its survival. . . Sango the Thunder God, the Snake God, Erinle, Otin, Esamba, all these gods and others were the stock-in-trade of ju-ju . . . cruelty and barbarism and revolting practices, blood and lust disguised as propitiation ceremonies for the spirits who came to plague and purge the jungle-heart of Africa. Latymer had been right.

These people, steeped from birth and pre-birth in the implicit beliefs and understandings of their ancestors, could not easily or quickly be weaned from a way of life which held life itself as cheap as dirt, could not have their thought-stream dammed and diverted in the short span of one or two generations. Behind the police façades of the Negro colonies here in London even, behind the faces of the bus-conductors and the street-sweepers and the lawyers and the businessmen, behind the too-smart suits and the decorative shoes and the colourful shirts, there lurked still those deep impulses, impulses which, in blind and sheerly instinctive obedience to the powerful, compelling voice of Africa as personified by the man who called himself Edo, could break right through as soon as the moment of action came. Even the hard-headed Jiddle had been half inclined to believe in these things; and Shaw realized, as he read on, that you didn’t even need to believe in order to see the stark fact that most of Africa’s millions had no possible doubt in
their
minds that voodoo and the ju-ju man and the Dark Gods were there yet, and always would be, that they were immortal and timeless, while the white man’s meaner substitutes of mission and hospital were only drearily temporary and could be swept away. Indeed, Shaw’s newspapers lately had told him that in some ways Africa was ‘advancing’ backward, that in many areas, as the white men withdrew, the old practices were coming back.

And yet Patrick MacNamara had intended being a doctor.

Surely the doctors, at least, among the Africans had given up the old nonsenses? A man who intended to study the white man’s medicine must surely have gone halfway towards rejection—or could he be rediverted? Probably he could.

It was still a puzzle, and Shaw couldn’t fit the pieces together until he’d found MacNamara.

He got back to the flat shortly after twelve-thirty and found it empty. Because he’d expected to find Debonnair there when he arrived, he waited in a fever of impatience until he heard the doorbell.

When he answered it a light rain was falling, and Debonnair was looking seductive in a flame-coloured lightweight mackintosh which set off her hair and her tall, slim figure beautifully. The clear hazel eyes smiled at him, and she gave him a thumbs-up sign as she came into the hall.

He said, “Good girl!”

“Not so fast. Look.”

She’d kept her other hand behind her back, and now Shaw realized why. Smiling triumphantly, she brought out the long, wrapped cardboard box. She said, “That’s why I was rather a long time. It’s the sweetest little frock, darling—bought on your orders, remember?”

“Fifty guineas.”

He whistled. “You’ve got a hope!”

“I repeat—on your orders, Commander Shaw! Right?” She put her face up and he kissed it. He said indulgently, “Right! I’ll fix that somehow, even if you get me shot . . . which is quite likely. Latymer looks at all the expense accounts himself.” Putting his hands on her shoulders, he slewed her round and took her mackintosh and hung it up. “How about a drink?”

“Just what I need. Give me one, and I’ll tell you all about it.” She walked ahead of him into the sitting-room, and he studied her back view appreciatively. Going across to the cupboard he brought out the glasses. He poured the girl a gin, a whisky for himself. As she sipped, curled up in a big leather armchair, she told him.

She said, “I can’t tell you in detail how it happened, but these things do, between women. Just a little interest shown, and passing the time of day—you know? I found out that a young lady by the name of Gillian Ross had been upset yesterday over something she’d read in the papers, and she’d asked Mrs du Pont—that’s the madame—if she could go home. Which she did. And she hasn’t been in to-day. When madame rang Mrs Tait, who’s the young lady’s landlady, she was told the girl was ‘poorly’ and wouldn’t be in for a day or two. Does that help?”

“Yes, I think it fits, Deb. Sounds like the right girl. . . I take it there weren’t any others who’d been upset?”

She shook her head. “Only her.”

“Good. I suppose you didn’t get her address, did you?”

“No. Short of asking right out, there didn’t seem to be a way, and I knew you wouldn’t want me to show too much curiosity. But it shouldn’t take long to find out, should it?” She smiled up at him over the rim of the glass, provocatively. “Use that brain of yours, darling!”

He grinned. “All right, wonder-girl! I’ve ticked over. Mrs Tait’s on the phone, we know that, so she’ll be in the book. I don’t know what I’d do without you!”